Verizon Wireless, ATT and T- Mobile USA plan to invest $100
million in their Isis mobile wallet venture, Bloomberg reports. The
amount of funding depends on how successful Isis is at attracting banks
and merchants. $100M for Isis
Separately, Visa is encouraging U.S. retailers to shift to retail
checkout systems that let consumers pay using their mobile phones. Visa
says it will let merchants that switch to credit-card readers
supporting EMV technology to forego costly annual security certifications.
EMV is an open standards set of specifications for smart card
payments and acceptance devices. The EMV specifications were developed
to define a set of requirements to ensure interoperability between
chip-based payment cards and terminals. EMV actually could extend the
use of card-based payments, as well as play a role in mobile payment
capabilities as well.
Starting in 2015, it will also stop requiring banks to reimburse most
merchants for some types of credit-card fraud, which can be prevented
by using EMV systems, Visa says. Both moves will save retailers money on
their transaction support operations.Read More back to top 
The 2011 KPMG Mobile Payments Outlook,
based on a survey of nearly 1,000 executives primarily in the financial
services, technology, telecommunications, and retail industries
globally found that 83 percent of the respondents believe that mobile
payments will be mainstream within four years (by 2015).
Seventy-two percent of the executives said that mobile payments are
now or will be reasonably important in the future, with specialist
online systems building on its leading position as a payment method, and
m-banking and near field communication (NFC) gaining significantly
greater traction than today. Fifty-eight percent said they have a mobile
payments strategy in place.
In fact, 46 percent believe mobile payments will be mainstream within
two years. One might argue that forecasts of this sort are notoriously
unreliable, with respondents overestimating near term prospects.
Analysts at Gartner, for example, use a model of how expectations for
significant new technologies running in a predictable cycle. What the
cycle suggests is that expectations nearly always (always, according to
the model) run ahead of marketplace acceptance.
What the Gartner hype cycle suggests is that expectations for mobile
payments using near field communications are at a point where we can
expect five to 10 years to elapse until NFC actually begins to make
serious inroads as an adopted mainstream technology. The emphasis
probably is important to note: “begins.”
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Free Conferencing Calling From Mobile Marketing and Technology
“Ten years from now, we’ll be able to live without much of a wallet,”
Todd Ablowitz, president of mobile payments consulting firm Double
Diamond Group, predicts. “We are seeing a march in that direction.”
But “wallets” aren’t the same thing as “payments.” Mobile wallet
systems assume the existence of mobile payment features, but actually
are ways to allow credentials of various types to be stored and used on a
mobile device, so that a loyalty program is automatically recognized at
the time of payment, with no addition need to swipe a loyalty card.
Wallets also will be a building block for all sorts of promotion
and marketing efforts aimed at loyalty program customers, before they go
shopping, when they are in the vicinity of one of their favorite retail
locations, or while in the store. Wallets also can help retailers prep
customers for return visits, perhaps by offering an inducement or offer
“on your next visit.”
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